


Between the Shadow and the Soul

by eatitnerds



Series: The Demon Had a Spell on Me [4]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Deer teeth, Dry Humping, M/M, Mild Gore, Older Dipper Pines, Trans Dipper Pines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-23 14:27:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16160747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eatitnerds/pseuds/eatitnerds
Summary: Or, Five Times Bill Tries and Fails to Express His Feelings and One Time He Actually Succeeds.  Dipper has known for a while now that he's in love with a demon.  The demon in question is having some problems coming to terms with his own damn feelings.





	Between the Shadow and the Soul

**Author's Note:**

> MY FIRST EVER FIVE+ONE FIC. Possibly also my last! Who knows!
> 
> Sorry to anyone who subscribed to this series and saw the email about this fic and opened the email and THEN opened the fic to actually READ this damn thing that it took me 18.5 months to get it up. In that time I've earned a bachelor's and a master's degree in English literature, so. Maybe that makes it better?? Not sure if it makes my writing better but by god am I a PRO at bullshitting now.

▲▲▲

_I love you as one loves certain dark things,_

_In secret, between the shadow and the soul._

△△△

0\. Dipper had said “Holy shit, I love you,” for the first time in response to something stupid and flippant Bill had said to him.  Looking back, he couldn’t even remember _what_ it was that Bill had said to spur Dipper’s declaration, and it was no real surprise.  He and Mabel (and Stan, and Ford, and Soos) exchanged “I love you”s all the time. It wasn’t that they said it flippantly, though, just that it came out so easily whenever Dipper really cared for someone.  It was a reminder, like a hug or a kiss on the cheek, of a bond that had been hard-earned. Dipper never had been able to make emotional connections with the speed and ease that Mabel had. With Bill, once it had been said for the first time, it was as natural as breathing to say it again, and again, and again.  The way Bill surged to kiss him when he said it was an added bonus.

It didn’t bother him in the slightest that Bill never said it back to him—really, it didn’t.  But it seemed to bother Bill, this lack of reciprocity, even if Dipper knew the demon’s devotion to be absolute and unwavering.  It was obvious, because for all the fevered kissing, Bill still acted… nervous. Like he wanted to tell Dipper the same, but he couldn’t quite figure out how to go about it.

1\. Mabel, at least, considered the trio of magically protective gifts Bill had given him each to be their own separate declaration of his love.  “I keep telling you, he’s got all of these feelings, but he doesn’t know what to do with them, _so,_ ” she gestured to his neck, and then to his knees, where the blanket had been draped at the time, “he makes you things!  He’s kind of like me, actually, except he obviously doesn’t have the ‘made with Mabel love’ tags that I’ve got.”

“And _I_ keep telling _you_ that he gave me this stuff because he—he wants to protect what’s his.”  Dipper flushed beneath Mabel’s gaze. “He’s possessive.”

“That’s a kind of love,” said Mabel, though she looked vaguely uncomfortable with the idea, as she had when Dipper first told her about Bill’s little ‘you’re mine’ speech.  “I guess he wouldn't be able to love you in a normal human way, anyway, since he's not human.”

“It doesn’t count,” said Dipper, crossing his arms.  “Not unless he says it, and he didn’t, and he’s not _going to._  And I’m fine with that.”  One hand toyed absently with the stone hanging from his neck, and he thought of Bill’s long, cool fingers gripping his hips as though he were something precious, something to be kept close.  “I really am fine with that,” he repeated.

Mabel threw her hands up in a gesture of defeat.  “And I really don’t believe you! But whateverrr,” she glanced at her kitten-shaped watch, “I’m late for a date with a probably normal human boy.”  She winked at him. “Maybe this one’ll be a vampire, huh?”

“Yeah, maybe,” said Dipper to her back, staring idly at the stone clutched in his fingertips.

2\. The offal that Bill had laid out on the floor of Dipper and Mabel’s bedroom began to stink long before Dipper got home from the day’s adventures.  Grunkle Stan had thrown up at the smell coming from the twins’ bedroom, whereas Ford had made it all the way into the doorway before his stomach did a backflip up into his throat and emptied its contents on the floor, mixing easily with the extant carnage (though the strawberry ice cream he’d been snacking on made a sharp contrast with the dark organ meats.  Neither Grunkle had been willing to make an attempt to actually clean up the stuff themselves, but Ford was willing to make a run to the store, at least.

Dipper and Mabel came home, tired and ready to flop into bed, only to find themselves equipped with elbow-length gloves, heavy duty trash bags, mops, the most powerful floor cleaner Ford could find in town, and face masks that Stan seemed to have dipped directly into his horrible cologne.  The last was so overpowering that they refused to put them on until they had smelt their bedroom for themselves, but the masks and everything else proved unnecessary when they reached the top of the stairs. The air was clear, the breathing was easy, and their bedroom was as messy as they had left it, no sigils wrought of flesh to be found.  Bill had apparently thought better of his “gift” and gotten rid of it himself. Both twins were grateful not to have to clean up the mess they’d expected, and they listened contentedly to Stan’s loud complaints of wasted cologne.

3\. Deer teeth, it seemed, were the demonic equivalent of flowers—suitable for any occasion calling for a gift, but especially romantic ones.  Doubly so when you were trying to apologize for a horribly botched attempt at a romantic gesture, perhaps? Or at least, that was what Dipper figured to be more or less the case when he woke up one morning to find them _everywhere_ on his side of the attic bedroom.  They were scattered across his nightstand, the top of the dresser, the shelves and the piles of books stacked there.  Strings of them hung from the ceiling, criss-crossing wildly over Dipper’s bed with no pattern discernible.

A lesser man would have been perturbed, even frightened, but after all he’d been through, and after listening to his Grunkles’ disgusted descriptions of the offal incident, Dipper could tell a gift from Bill Cipher from a threat from anyone else in the blink of an eye.  Even if he couldn’t have, Bill had spelled it out for him. The three teeth just above Dipper’s face each had a little heart painted upon them in (what Dipper suspected was) blood. He hoped it wasn't human, though he had no intention of ever asking.

For a long moment, Dipper lay there still and silent, considering the display.  Then he gripped the stone that hung around his neck, brought it to his mouth, and hissed the word _no_ into the hole in its center, sending his verdict directly to Bill.  He let it go, closed his eyes, and went back to sleep.

When he next woke, it was with a sigh of relief upon finding the deer teeth had vanished.

4\. Dipper couldn’t stand the idea of taking his clothes off in front of Bill—not yet.  But he let Bill’s long fingers wander up beneath the hem of his binder, stroking his stomach, confident that the paneling over his breasts was too tight for Bill to explore beneath it.  (Not once had it occurred to him that Bill might _know_ not to go there, given the anxiety Dipper showed about that part of his body.)  He wouldn't let Bill's hand slip under the hem of his shorts to play with his pulsing clit—but like most things, he was warming up to the idea, and he allowed Bill more and more liberties with his body.

He felt especially warm at times like these, when he found himself pinned beneath Bill, grinding his hips down on the heel of one big hand while Bill licked into his mouth with the sort of fervency normally only seen in starving men presented with a feast.  If the noises he made into Dipper’s mouth were any indication, Bill found him just as delicious, if not more so, than any such feast.

Bill pulled away to give Dipper a chance to breathe, and Dipper’s gasps were punctuated by praise and encouragements and delighted exclamations.  “You’re so—oh—you’re so good at this—holy fuck— _Bill_ —don’t stop—I need you—to—oh—I love you, fuck—”  As it had done before, the declaration spurred Bill into kissing Dipper even harder and more deeply than before, a devouring kiss that left Dipper dizzy and panting when Bill let up.  Dipper hardly noticed, then, the way Bill’s eyebrows furrowed and his mouth opened as if to speak. He was too preoccupied by the tight hot pleasure building in his groin. He screwed his eyes shut and bucked his hips as he rode out the waves of his orgasm.  It wasn’t until much later, as he began to drift into sleep, that it occurred to him Bill might have been trying to work up the nerve to tell him something.

5\. Dipper had only just woken up when his hand had brushed something cool and papery in his bed, and now, holding it in his hands and scrutinizing it sleepily, he suspected that it had been Mabel’s idea. The handwriting that marked the envelope with his name was undeniably Bill’s scrawling and nigh illegible hand, but writing out his feelings was not in line with Bill’s distaste for divulging his own weaknesses.  Actually giving the letter over to Dipper may not have even been Bill’s intention, since Dipper had found it in the tangle of his bedsheets. It must, he decided, have been in Bill’s pocket and slid out during the previous night’s snuggling session. Bill frequently left a variety of other, much less pleasant items in Dipper’s bed as a result of an insistence on using his humanoid form’s clothes for storage and an abhorrence for zippered pockets.  The man couldn’t define the word subtle if you held a gun to his head (not that a gun could do much to him in the first place), so the letter couldn't possibly be there on purpose.

Dipper glanced over at Mabel’s bed: empty.  He glanced at the clock hung on the wall: 10:37.  Bill was likely to emerge from Ford’s lab at any moment, knowing that this was when the twins usually woke, and finding Mabel (presumably) alone at the breakfast table eating her typical oversized bowl of sugar cereal, he would soon be bounding up to the attic to rouse Dipper.  

In short, Dipper had precious little time to: one, decide whether he was actually going to open the letter, knowing that Bill _probably_ wouldn’t be happy with him doing so and two, read the damn thing.  It was tempting, so very tempting. A letter was much easier to cope with than Bill’s gruesome gifts, and much more direct than waiting for Bill to speak directly about his feelings.  Besides, would Bill have the same qualms if it were him in Dipper’s place? No, of course not. Bill would tear the damn thing open and read Dipper’s secrets, just like he did with Dipper’s journal, but…

But Dipper didn’t exactly keep his feelings secret, did he?  The journal certainly didn’t have any emotional secrets hidden inside, aside from Dipper’s occasional exclamations of fear, and even those weren’t _secret,_ not from Bill, at least.  Nor, as he had told Mabel just a few days before, was he worried about Bill’s _lack_ of feelings for him.  It was clear how much Bill cared about him.  Three words, written or spoken, hardly mattered in the face of that fact.  And there was no guarantee that those words would be found within this envelope, anyway.

Unconsciously, he’d been fiddling with the envelope as he thought this decision over, and it was just when the door to his and Mabel’s bedroom swung open that his fiddling had manifested in absently peeling the flap of the envelope up.  Bill would swear later that he hadn’t colored with embarrassment at this sight because dream demons did not _get_ embarrassed, Pine Tree, and anyway, since his humanoid form wasn’t _actually_ human, it didn’t have a vascular system to facilitate such an undignified involuntary psychological reaction.  Dipper would, in turn, insist that this was bullshit and that Bill may not have turned bright pink, but he had definitely been blushing.

In the moment, Bill only laughed loudly and snatched the envelope out of Dipper’s hands, his voice quavering so slightly that Dipper couldn’t be totally sure of it as he asked, “Pine Tree, have you been plundering my pockets while I’ve been distracted by your human charms?”

“Nah,” said Dipper with a shrug, “I was just about to get up and find you to give it back.  Must’ve slipped out of your pocket, huh?”

“Of course,” said Bill.  His voice was all confidence and nonchalance as he slid the envelope into his jacket pocket.  “Anyway, there’s a surprise in this, and you don’t get it yet.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, kid.  Now come downstairs and eat breakfast.  I’ve got plans for the day and we need to get going soon.” Bill turned on his heel and walked out of the room, waving his hand in a vague gesture for Dipper to follow.

Dipper followed.  He didn’t see the envelope again, and he found that he truly didn’t mind.

+1. Bill had led Dipper deeper into the forest for this particular date, and they sat beside an unfamiliar brook that burbled gently past wildflowers that Dipper couldn’t name.  The moon hung half-visible through the trees, huge and red. When Dipper had mentioned the upcoming blood moon to Bill, the demon hadn’t had a clue what he was talking about. When Dipper had explained, BIll had lit up with excitement and babbled something about ancient worshippers, calling the blood moon by a name in a language that sounded as if it had been old when Stonehenge was new.  The water of the brook looked almost like blood in this light. The forest around them thrummed with dark excitement. Bill fed Dipper by hand, picking up succulent little morsels off a platter and holding them up to Dipper’s mouth. They both shivered a little whenever his fingertips brushed Dipper’s parted lips.

By the time the platter was empty, Dipper’s eyelids had become heavy, and he slid slowly from sitting beside Bill to leaning on his shoulder, then to laying his head in Bill’s lap.  The steady strokes of Bill’s fingers in his hair brought him just to the brink of sleep: his breath slow and even, his eyelids closed. Bill must have thought he had fallen fully asleep, because his voice was quiet but perfectly clear above Dipper, meant not to be heard by a conscious mind.

But Dipper smiled sleepily, fingers sliding over Bill’s other hand, which rested beside Dipper’s head.  “I love you, too,” he murmured, and let himself drift fully into the dark.

▲▲▲

**Author's Note:**

> I wish I were writing this series in direct chronological order instead of skipping to whatever interests me most at the time, because with every new part I have to comb through all the other parts to make sure my timeline isn't fucked up. Do tell me if you've noticed any of these inconsistencies, PLEASE. I continue not to have a beta.
> 
> Also, the blood moon thing is total bullshit that I thought would be fun. As far as I can tell, no blood moon has occurred recently/will occur soon that falls within summer by our calendar.
> 
> Annnd one last thing: I'm still working on this series whenever I get both the time and the willingness. Hopefully the time in between parts will not continue to grow exponentially. If it does, I'll meet you here in three years to surreptitiously hand you some long and wordy porn, I guess.


End file.
